Ukraine, previously a place most foreigners happily ignored, has forced itself on the world's attention this year.

The fact that Vladimir Putin stole Crimea would have been enough on its own. It was the first annexation in Europe since the second world war and cast Russia's relations with the west into crisis. Then came Russian intervention in the east of the country, Ukraine shelling rebel cities, and the downing of MH17: horrific images of bodies lying among the sunflowers and an unseemly squabble over access to the site.

Rocket attacks and death have gone from being unimaginable to routine in a matter of weeks. Even for people who have been writing about Ukraine for years, it is hard to comprehend how one of the most lazy, lovely and laid-back countries in the old Soviet Union fell so far, so fast.

Few things summed up the old Ukraine – a place of kind people, corrupt policemen, incompetent officials, unexpected survivals from the USSR – more perfectly than Andrey Kurkov's novels. Death and the Penguin, a surreal account of what happens when a Kiev obituary writer adopts a penguin from a bankrupt zoo, is his most famous book, but his whole series is a rewarding glimpse into post-Soviet Ukraine.

Now he has published diaries covering the period of the revolution. They seamlessly mix the everyday and the seminal and provide a fascinating guide to how Ukraine has found itself where it is.

Kurkov is a strange Ukrainian. He was born in Russia, speaks Russian as a first language and writes in Russian. Putin has described Ukraine's revolution as one led by fascists inspired by hatred of all things Russian, so Kurkov is a particularly valuable guide for anyone seeking a more nuanced explanation of why so many people took against ex-president Viktor Yanukovych and the system he created.

"I am a Russian myself, after all, an ethnically Russian citizen of Ukraine. But I am not 'a Russian', because I have nothing in common with Russia and its politics. I do not have Russian citizenship and I do not want it," he wrote in January, on seeing the first stirrings of the Crimean separatism that eventually led to the peninsula's annexation.

Kurkov's version of events is one that has not gained enough traction in western media, which simplify this complex tale for an audience distracted by all the other stories of the day. For him, the revolution is about corruption, about a government looting its own country, about people's desire to live with dignity in a country governed by rules, not people, to be free to decide their own destiny.

"If everyone accepts the rules, the poor police officer will find himself bound by them as well. If we don't accept them, he will maintain the right to take ice-creams for his children from the local kiosk without paying for them. And so the kiosk owner's children will grow up hating the police officer," he wrote on 25 November 2013, less than a week after Yanukovych rejected closer ties with the European Union and the first protesters emerged on to the Maidan in central Kiev.

Yanukovych built a pyramid of kickbacks so efficiently that his son, a dentist, became the third-richest man in the country in just three years. He was not giving up his system without a fight and police moved in to disperse the protesters. That brought new protesters and a demonstration became an uprising.

It was an uprising without leaders, despite opposition politicians' attempts to put themselves at its head. Spontaneous groups sprang up to provide food, healthcare, bedding and clothes. People living near the Maidan removed their Wi-Fi passwords to give the protesters access to the internet. Protesters pulled down the statue of Lenin and tried to change the country from the streets up.

Yanukovych and Putin struggled to respond to a kind of politics neither of them understood. They eventually settled on a deal for cheaper gas, believing wrongly that ordinary Ukrainians could be bought off as easily as their leaders.

"One wonders what else will become cheaper thanks to Putin's goodwill. Human life here already has an aspect so low that it could hardly fall any further," wrote Kurkov on 17 December.

There are signs that this is not quite the unedited diary it claims to be. He spells out concepts and movements unfamiliar to a western audience in a way no diarist would need to. Nonetheless, it does not feel like he is writing for effect or posterity. These are the genuine musings of a man who doesn't realise quite how important what he is witnessing will become. He never joined the crowd throwing petrol bombs at the police, but is a sympathetic observer. He understood why the revolution was happening.

The diary is not all politics. Kurkov writes about his children, about writer's block, about his trips to the sauna, his holidays and his speaking engagements. He strolls through the protest camps and describes the revolutionaries sitting around campfires sharing stories and gossip. The prose is charming: his ideas at one point are "clumsy as a tortoise".

Nonetheless, his thoughts keep coming back to the fate of his country, which he depicts clearly and simply: the annexation of Crimea, the dismembering of the east, chaos in Kiev. By the time Yanukovych fled in February, the whole country was convulsed with politics; every conversation was about the fate of the nation.

Ukraine, Kurkov writes, needs a period of calm to rebuild itself, to change its laws and to prosecute the wrongdoers. But that is something Putin will not give it. Yanukovych's form of government was modelled on Putin's, and the Kremlin cannot allow a revolution to upend such a system and form a stable, democratic state instead.

Ukraine Diaries is a book that was out of date before it was even published. Ukraine has moved a long way this year and has continued to do so since this book went to the printers. It has new laws against corruption, a better if imperfect government and a clearer sense of itself as a nation. But that has come at the cost of hundreds of lives. The death toll increases daily and shows no signs of abating.

I am glad Kurkov will be at the centre of the events as they unfold, ready to distil both tragedy and delight into his pithy, humane prose. The best way to oppose the waves of propaganda pouring over Ukraine is by telling the truth, so I hope this book will have a sequel.

Ukraine Diaries: Disptaches from Kiev is published by Harvill Secker (£9.99). Click here to buy it for £7.99 with free UK p&p. Oliver Bullough is Caucasus Editor for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting